Fold 'n' Drop Window Interaction 566
Mints writes "Following up on recent "Desktop Innovation" stories that have left some disappointed, I thought Pierre Dragicevic's exploration of Fold 'n' Drop warranted mention. Described as "a new interaction technique for seamlessly dragging and dropping between overlapping windows", Fold 'n' Drop allows the user to interact with layered or overlapping windows in a very intuitive manner. Refreshingly, Mr. Dragicevic provides both a sample implementation, in Java, and video demos. Mr. Dragicevic is a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Intuilab, Toulouse."
not for Longhorn (Score:1, Interesting)
Bring this to KDE/Gnome and there's one less reason for anyone above a "ma and popo" level to stick with Windoze.
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Gloves (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Desktop Never Metaphor it Didn't Like (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it was never very appropriate. Windows and icons and menus... on desktops?? Oh my!
Re:More trouble than it's worth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. I'm doing plugin development for Lightwave. I have a small LW window open. I have my editor open. I have a few file windows open. (Yes, I need them for this.) I have a PDF viewer open for documentation. I have a web browser open for accessing the knowledgebase. I sometimes even have an ICQ window open so I can talk to the people testing the code. I run dual monitors at 1600 by 1200 each, and I still have a bunch of overlapping going on.
Couldn't tell you if this particular desktop management system would do me any good or not (couldn't get the page to load) but I'll take any help I can get.
Re:Mac OS X Expose and Drag & Drop (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Left Button = Left-Click
2. Right Button = Right-Click
3. Scroll Click = Expose Show Application's Windows
4. Thumb Button = Expose Show All Windows
5. Second Thumb Button = Expose Show Desktop
This way, you can easily Drag from one window to any other window with the click of a button, also allowing you to switch quickly between apps. You can also get different reactions by holding the button down, which temporarily switches to that Expose mode, then returns to last mode when released, or when you click on it, it turns to that Expose mode until you click another button.
It REALLY hurts when I am working on a non-Expose enabled computer. Longhorn will only speed-up the switch to OSX, especially when compared to the new Macintel's loaded with OSX.5 Leopard, and its Red-Box abilities(Built-in VirtualPC abilities similar to Classic mode)
Cheers to Apple.
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:4, Interesting)
- Qua
Re:A-ha! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
Style over substance (Score:3, Interesting)
How many people actually move/copy files in this manner anyway? I suppose Jo(e) Average may but surely anyone who uses a computer at all regularly would copy and paste - I've even seen people copy/cut and paste using menus more than I have seen them drag and drop between open windows.
Neat trick, but... next!
UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a new UI concept, that is very promising and hasn't been implemented anywhere yet. A true opportunity for Linux to score a "first" in UI design -- this could be the next generation of window shading/rollup, the possibilities are endless.
And the comments are "in Mac OSX you do such-and-such instead", "in Windows you do such-and-such instead". Things like "this problem is solved" -- as if there was One True Solution in UI design! -- and "before doing your research you should stop at the Apple store" -- as if PhD research didn't do related work assessment! --, enumerations of Windows key sequences, and so on. And those are ranked "5, Insightful".
A few years ago the comments would range from the usual "GUI? Give me a CLI any day" to discussions on how to implement this on Linux and which wm would get it first, which would (d?)evolve to a healthy wm flamefest.
The Slashdot audience truly has changed. *sigh*
Force Feedback! (Score:5, Interesting)
jm2c
Re:UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to comment on the topic: to me GUI innovation relates to how this fits into your cognitive space. On that note, I'll say that I find Ion a GUI that fits right in the UNIXspace. Being unprejudiced, it mixes freely between CLI and GUI. You can switch between shell and graphical applications without having to resort to mouse clicks (and if you use a keyboard, contrary to some misconceptions, you still are using your hands).
A discussion here yesterday brought up the issue of the Archy [raskincenter.org] interface, a creation of Jeff Raskins ("The Humane Interface"). I found Ion to resemble Archy to a point. Archy, however, admits some tribute to Emacs. Hardcore unix people know how to fly on Emacs (Vi was developed to work on a 300 baud modem by Bill Joy - people don't get this basic simple fact to this day).
The CLI doesn't go away in UNIXspace, because it is a fundamental part of our mind: the little pieces of language that fit together with orthogonality. The algebra of it: Unixspeak. Like any foreign language, you might hate it or love it (eventually, those that hate typing will learn to love once you get to the point of using voice recognition: "cat that file and grep it for July"). Let's see Windows do that [grin].
GUIs also have their mental space. But no GUI can plan ahead or be as compact as a means of expression as languages. Loop a click-action 100 times. Design a language to describe a 30-step complex GUI-clicking instruction. This will be a language. A GUI has widgets. Widgets constitute a very, very small vocabulary. What are the nouns, verbs and adjectives of widgets?
So, I guess I'm saying I'm not at all impressed. Even if you say it's very innovative. To me, this bias towards metaphors that seek to emulate physical situations (like the "archives" and "folders", or "My Computer") are nothing but lack of imagination. Sure, cool computer graphics. But I use my computer to work, it's a machine to augment thought, not a toy.
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:2, Interesting)
Some programs are primary mouse-driven (eg. 3D modeler). Others rely primarily on keyboard input (eg. word processor). I would argue that an interface strives to be most efficient when it maximizes the functionality of its primary input device.
For a 3D modeler, this means an intuitive 3D interface for rotations, use of all mouse buttons, and carefully positioned clickable buttons and toolbars.
For a text-editor/word-processor, this means loads of keyboard shortcuts. emacs/vi come to mind (MS Word falls short in my mind - I *need* ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k).
What become challenging for the developer (and, consequentially, the user) are applications that are sometimes mostly mouse-driven, sometimes mostly keyboard-driven. These apps necessarily force the user to switch between the mouse and keyboard frequently. Often, there is some gain to be had via keyboard shortcuts, but the interface does not always allow these to be most efficient.
A web browser, for example, or a file browser require both a mouse and keyboard (OK, so many of us get by just fine with the terminal, but let's ignore that). In the case of the web browser, many folks are drawn to opera and firefox specifically because of their extensive keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, allowing you to stick to whatever input device you were already using.
So, for example, in opera, i can gesture left if I'm using the mouse, or I can hit 'z' if I'm using the keyboard. It's *never* more efficient to reach for one or the other, but ultimately, I'll always need both (I didn't type in this post using cut and paste, and I certainly didn't click on the link to your post by tabbing through everything).
The *real* problem is that your window manager does not allow efficient navigation via the mouse. If, for example, you had mouse gestures, hot corners, or OS X expose functionality bound to extraneous buttons on your 5 button mouse, you would reach less often for the keyboard when you were already using the mouse.
You're right - reaching for the mouse just adds more time, but so does reaching for the keyboard. A window manager is best when it forces you to do neither.
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:3, Interesting)
You want to move text to a different application? Select it, and then drag it through Exposé to any window.
If you drag it to the desktop, it creates a file called whatever.textClipping. The file can be moved around or stored. It's a normal file. If you drag the file to an application, the full text of the file is pasted into your window. If you double-click the file, you can read it just like a normal file. I have three of these files on my desktop right now.
Want to add an image to your document? Drag it to the window. Want to add an attachment to an email? Drag it to the window. It's much simpler.
Re:Keyboard Navigation Mouse Navigation (Score:1, Interesting)
Not changed that much...! (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I wish the computer cognoscenti *would* give more emphasis to truly graphical computing.
The fact that the keyboard is more efficient for interacting with the majority of computer operations that people do really just goes to show that our culture hasn't advanced from thinking in pipelineable data chunks to true objects.
For much software, config files, switches, and option params still dominate over graphical dialogs, and even those that do exist in polished software are still just checkbox and radio equivalents of config settings, not real objects in the sense of "chopsticks interacting with noodles" (associating entities with containers).
Even most GUIs are simply visual equivalents of the same verb-noun operations that CLIs have always used, eg, graphically foo.txt dragging up a level is the same as mv foo.txt
I think the future is somewhere in the way non-linear video editing suites and graphical art programs work, but more consistent.
Hopefully now that OSes are moving to 3rd gen windowing architectures that allow much more complex visual depictions (OS X a few years ago, Longhorn next year, Linux real soon), more experiments like this will be tried, and new interactions will emerge.
Although this post has made no sense, here's to truly graphical computing!
Re:It's already a solved problem. (Score:2, Interesting)
Expose is a great tool. I use it every day and miss it dearly when I have to use Windows. However, if I had a "thick" stack on my desktop, and not arbitrarily thick (meaning, not something like ten 100x200 pixel windows all stacked atop each other instead of already spread out over the desktop) then it would be significantly easier to fold back the "top" windows to reveal those underneath than to use Expose and pick amongst randomly-arranged, visually indistinguishable thumbnails.
Re:Innovation or Eye Candy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone thinks that what he is used to is the greatest thing ever, and everyone's life would be so much better if they finally would see the light and do it the right way. That's why interface design is hard, and shouldn't be left to programmers (or gamers, for that matter).
focus != bring to front would be simpler (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:UI innovation and the Slashdot audience (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes.
Nope.
Actually, it's kind of a sad idea. The person who came up with it seems to be thinking in narrow terms. They seem to have started with the assumption that drag and drop, as it works already, is the best way to do things so that only evolutionary changes need to made, and not any revolutionary changes. Specifically, they seem to be laboring under the assumption that you can't temporarily let go of the thing you're dragging by releasing the mouse button.
As a result, they've solved a problem (that you can't drag and drop between two locations if one of them is obscured) by making you do a complicated, error-prone mouse gesture that requires fine positional movements of the mouse all while you're holding down the button (which makes it that much harder because you have to maintain force on the button while changing force on other parts of the mouse to move it, all with one hand).
If they weren't stuck in the paradigm of traditional drag and drop, they might've suggested a much easier to learn and much simpler to execute solution: create a place on the screen that can temporarily hold whatever you're trying to drag and drop, something that will hold onto whatever you're dragging while you're doing whatever you need to (rearranging windows, or maybe something else). Basically, a second hand. In fact, I would use a hand as the icon for it.
If you have a second hand, you can locate the original location, drag the thing from there to the other hand, then locate the desired destination, and then drag it from the other hand to where you ultimately want it to go. Just like you do in real life when you want to move something but you have to manipulate other things between picking it up and putting it down. Nobody in the real world flips through stuff with the same hand they're holding things with if they have the other hand free.